Hands-on with Google’s new calendar interface for mobile phones

Google has launched a mobile version of its popular web-based calendar app, …

Continuing its efforts to become the best-known name in mobile Internet services, Google launched a mobile version of its web-based calendar app last week. Google Calendar for mobile devices syncs with your regular Google calendar online and reduces the need to maintain multiple calendars on different devices. The calendar can be accessed by navigating to calendar.google.com or google.com/calendar/m from a mobile phone's or PDA's web browser.

Calendar events are laid out in a small-screen-friendly list format that the user can easily navigate. "Clicking" on an event link brings up all the details from that event, such as date, time, location (with a handy link to a map), description, and a list of attendees. The main mobile calendar page displays the next 10 events on your calendar from today, no matter when they occur (they could be over a period of two days or three weeks). Hitting "Next" at the top of the page takes you to the next 10 events after that, and "Previous" takes you to the last 10 events.

I lead a very exciting life

Users can also add new events to their Google Calendars through the mobile interface. This is done by entering text into a box the same way they would do so on the computer—for example, entering "1pm brunch Sunday" immediately saves a new event called "brunch" to my calendar for this coming Sunday at 1pm. This is reflected both on my mobile calendar and regular Google Calendar on the computer more or less instantly.

The application may be relatively minor compared to some of Google's other efforts in mobile applications but handy for people who rely on one calendar to keep track of their lives. "We realize that more people in the world have mobile phones than have computers, and people take their cell phones with them everywhere," software engineer Davesh Parekh wrote on the Official Google Blog. "One of our main goals on the Calendar team is to make planning your events and maintaining your schedule as easy as possible."

Compared to the default calendar/datekeeper that comes installed on most mobile phones, Google's mobile calendar is not only slightly more usable, it's more useful because it's connected to the Internet. The map link is particularly helpful when I'm out and about. One thing that Google could improve upon might be to somehow port the calendar's alerts over to the mobile space. However, as it stands now, I'm pleased with the newly-ported offering.